Wednesday, September 2, 2020

The King is Dead, Long Live the King by Julian Randall

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

 

Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged

            I know                 I know             the kingdom is not fair

but it’s what I have  a montage of red and a mitosis

                 of knuckles   I’m not sure how you could expect me

to love anything       Ain’t no question

                                                               sadness is regal like that

                         golden and replaceable     once I wanted

a lineage of identical men        once a mouth soft and hot

as the quickest way that gold can hurt you     You see

       a pattern yet?               I practice the want of nothing and fail

                                          I’ve been shown how ugly I can be

when I am invisible

                                         I don’t believe in yesterdays

The throat of loneliness?               Straddled with my knife

            I press my hands to my face                  and the lament is a valley

the light sags through       What do you do when you have

                       lost Everything?       Rewrite the history of Everything

I don’t like my smile                   because someone told me I didn’t like it

            Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered

                 Flex the antonym of Missing            I avenge myself

Stretch my hands     I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty

                                         ain’t no question              I monarch

the lonely     I my own everything now        I miss my love and

            it is an American grief     I strike the smell from nostalgia

cut my memory to spite my country         What is the odor of nothing

            but my dominion in want of excess     I grin and pillars of bone flower

into sawed-off crowns      say I flex the light and the light flexes

            heat shimmer               unfurling like a bicep         my lust a mirage

where the body is merely a congealing of the river         I can feel it

      slowly drifting away from me    The world I knew is gone

and getting more gone            and my anthem populating my nose

            with an abundance of salt I slip the shroud over the life I named

and forget I belonged to someone once       My soverign's face is a riot

of diamonds whining            This will be a beautiful death   and I am free

and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again

I rock the jeweled shroud        become the bride of my own sad light



 

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